Zona III: el valle del río Apurímac

Published after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pelevin’s short novel Omon Ra (1991) is an interesting variation on the dystopian genre, since it directs its dystopian vision towards the past.

37 Drawing on Iurii Lotman’s analysis, Mark Griffiths interprets Moscow as the epitome of a

“concentric city,” due to its ring structure and the central Kremlin: “Whereas ‘eccentric’ St.

Petersburg exists at the edge of cultural space and tends toward contact with outside cultures,

‘concentric’ Moscow specifically lends itself to literary descriptions of hierarchy and isolation”

(484-85).

Rather than giving a speculative representation of the future, the novel represents the Soviet experiment as fantastic and grotesque, emphasizing its imperial and simulative nature.

The novel tells of a young man, Omon Krivomazov, whose dream of space exploration sharply contrasts to the bleak reality of everyday Soviet existence. Together with his friend Mitek, Omon enrolls in pilot school. They are then selected for the prestigious space academy to lead the Soviet mission to land on the moon. This mission first appears as a heroic sacrifice:

lacking adequate technology, Soviet cosmonauts cannot return to earth and have to die in space.

However, it later turns out that even this demand for a heroic death is a deception, because the participants of the mission never leave the earth. The simulation of the space flight is conducted in an unused part of the Moscow metro. The novel ends ambiguously, when, escaping his assassins, Omon takes a subway train.

Pelevin’s presentation of lackluster and cheerless Soviet life, filtered through the consciousness of the novel’s protagonist, is suffused with melancholia that is not usually associated with Pelevin’s works:

Да, это было так — норы, в которых проходила наша жизнь, действительно были темны и грязны, и сами мы, может быть, были под стать этим норам — но в синем небе над нашими головами среди реденьких и жидких звезд существовали особые сверкающие точки, искусственные, медленно ползущие среди созвездий, созданные тут, на советской земле, среди

блевоты, пустых бутылок и вонючего табачного дыма, — построенные из стали, полупроводников и электричества и теперь летящие в космосе. (23)³⁸ In its naturalistic presentation of everyday Soviet life, this description could serve as a companion to a chernukha film of the early 1990s.³⁹ Unlike these films, however, the novel takes its representation of Soviet reality to a new ironic level. It connects the dream of space exploration to drab everyday reality, suggesting that Soviet narratives of heroism served as a compensatory mechanism for the bleak lives of average citizens. The story of the protagonist, who, from his childhood, wants to dedicate his life to space exploration, well illustrates Pelevin’s 1990s interpretation of Soviet life.

Even this “brighter aspect” of Soviet reality turns out to be nothing more than an elaborate simulation because the Soviet space exploration program, as well as the protagonist’s heroic flight to the moon, turn out to be nothing but a sham designed by Soviet leaders to

38 “Yes, it was so. The holes, where we spent our lives, were dirty and dark. We ourselves were perhaps like these holes, yet in the blue skies over our heads, among scarce and liquid stars, existed bright, special, artificial dots, crawling among the constellations. They were made here on the Soviet Land, among the vomit, empty bottles, and stinking tobacco smoke; they were built of electrical semiconductors and steel, and were flying now in the cosmos.” (Citations of Omon Ra, Empire V, and Generation “П” are all my own translations.)

39 Chernukha films of the perestroika period were usually concerned with underprivileged or marginal populations, depicting grim social problems. They focused on violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and unmotivated sexual encounters. The films offer no resolutions to the social problems and emphasize the “physicality and naturalism” of everyday life (Graham 9).

impress naive citizens and deceive Western powers. Pelevin presents the history of Soviet space exploration as a government conspiracy and elaborate simulation of reality. Thus, Omon Ra can be seen as both an illustration of and contribution to the discussion of the simulative nature of socialist realism and Soviet life by such theorists as Epstein, Genis, and Groys.⁴⁰ Pelevin’s absurdist satire draws attention to three inextricably linked aspects of Soviet simulation: its connection to deception and self-deception, its capacity to pervade all spheres of social life, and its association with the violence and trauma of Soviet history.

In Pelevin’s novel, all Soviet citizens, to some extent, take part in the processes of simulation. While the authorities consciously engage in various simulative practices and dedicate their entire lives to these absurd endeavors, average people, represented by Omon Ra and his fellow students, also become willing participants in the state deception and self-deception. Even though the Soviet elite is more conscious of these simulative processes than common citizens, the participation of all members insures the stability of the system. Throughout the novel, Omon remains a willing participant in the state’s elaborate deception that creates a simulation of the moon landing for the consumption of the public. Only at the very end of the novel, at the moment of his expected death, Omon becomes fully self-aware and realizes that he has never left Earth and that his “space experiences” were a part of an elaborately constructed simulation.

The simulative nature of Soviet reality still incorporates violence as its central principle.

For example, replicating the heroic life of Aleksei Mares'ev, all students at the flight school lose their legs through a forced amputation. This reference to Mares'ev and his fictional biography, Boris Polevoi’s The Tale of a Real Man (Povest' o nastoiashchem cheloveke), connects the

40 See the Introduction for a more detailed discussion of this topic.

Soviet space program to Stalinism and socialist realism.⁴¹ Only Omon and Mitek escape this fate; however, they are actually chosen for an even more destructive state project, represented by a heroic trip to the moon. All participants in the simulated moon landing die in the process, and Omon is supposed to kill himself at the end of his mission. The grotesque quality of the state violence only increases its traumatic effect, revealing the absurd nature of Soviet “heroic sacrifice,” which, according to Pelevin, sustains the narrative of Soviet progress and scientific achievement. Therefore, the heroism of Omon and his friends has no higher meaning and represents, instead, an absurd aspect of Soviet life.⁴² As a result, the Soviet project lacks any foundation, since expansion into space is actually replaced by the protagonist’s trip to the underground, which ironizes the reach of Soviet power.

Like simulation, empire serves as an organizing principal of the novel’s plot, yet Pelevin’s representation of imperial space is quite unconventional. Whereas novels, influenced by the context of empire, are often concerned with far-flung locales, Pelevin presents imperial

41 Lilya Kaganovsky sees Omon Ra and Sergei Livnev’s film, Hammer and Sickle (Serp i Molot) as attempts to represent Soviet masculinity—masculinity that is paradoxically based on lack.

These works share other thematic similarities: for example, both present Soviet experience in dystopian and fantastic terms.

42 Discussing the significance of Soviet traumatic history, Aleksandr Etkind points out that “the victims, and even more so their peers and their descendants, wish to find meaning in their suffering. If meaning can be discovered, then death becomes a sacrifice, rather than just a loss or a murder” (“Magical Historicism” 636). In Omon Ra, Pelevin categorically denies any sacrificial meaning of Soviet history.

space as contracting, folding into the imperial center. For instance, even though space exploration is usually conducted from a peripheral location, such as Baikonur in Kazakhstan, Omon and Mitek are brought to Moscow to take part in the training for the moon landing. The prestigious space academy is located on Lubianka Square, under the infamous KGB building.

Like the forced amputations earlier in the novel, this location creates an association between Soviet heroism and its darker side of Stalinist terror. This subterranean site for training and simulative space exploration is the first in a number of such locations, replicated in Pelevin’s later novels, particularly Generation “П” and Empire V. Rather than focusing on the spectacular displays of imperial power, Pelevin places imperial centers underground, representing the imperial impulse as a conspiratorial project and as the dark underbelly of Soviet and post-Soviet modernity.

Like Generation “П” and Empire V, Omon Ra creates a link between the USSR and ancient empires. In a drug-induced state, Omon’s friend Mitek recounts an imaginative history of world empires, presenting himself as a participant in each historical period. Condee points out that this imperial history includes such references as the Akkadian dynastic empire of Mesopotamia (4300-4200 BCE); Queen Shubad and Meskalamdug of the Third Dynasty of the Ur Empire (2112-2004 CE); Nimhursag, the mother earth goddess and Nanna, the sun god of the Sumerian Empire (3500-2074 BCE), Nuun Ujol Chaak, twenty-third king of Mutul, part of the Mayan Empire (250-900 CE). Mitek’s references then move on to more familiar empires, such as the Roman Empire, the Third Reich, represented by General Erich Ludendorff, one of the first Nazi Party members in 1924. Mitek’s imperial excurses culminate with the Soviet empire (Imperial Trace 46). It seems then that Mitek’s torture and death at the hands of space academy authorities results from this unconscious knowledge of the darker side of the Soviet imperial project—its

connection to earlier “dark” empires. In contrast to his friend Mitek, Omon dreams of the Egyptian cult of the God Ra. Thus, Omon associates the Soviet imperial project with the spirituality of Egypt, giving his sacrificial trip to the moon a higher meaning. Symbolically, this self-deception places Omon at the hight of the space project and allows him to become the main cosmonaut and the last man to survive the moon landing.

Nancy Condee suggests that the references to the history of world empires allows Pelevin’s exploration of the parallel reach of the Soviet imperial project: “The expansion of Soviet power—

outward to the universe's receding edge, inward to the consciousness of the Soviet subject, a site as limitless and mysteriously unknowable as the universe—provides Pelevin with the occasion for his imaginative and grotesque refraction of the empire's predations” (Imperial Trace 46). In Pelevin’s ironic presentation, however, empire never expands; instead, it paradoxically folds onto itself, leading to the representation of imperial space as ever-narrowing and contracting. At the end of the novel, Omon realizes that the moon landing was nothing more than a series of simulated events conducted in a closed-off section of the Moscow metro.

The metro has traditionally played an important role in the imagination of the Moscow population, generating numerous urban legends and conspiracy theories.⁴³ Therefore, the metro becomes a logical choice for a conspiratorial explanation of the Soviet space program. Built in the 1930s as a part of the new socialist Moscow, the metro has close associations to the early Soviet era, Stalin, and socialist realism. In the 1930s, the Moscow metro was a remarkable technological achievement that also contained an immense iconography of power (Buck-Morss

43 The centrality of the metro in the urban imagination can be demonstrated, for example, by the popularity of Dmitrii Glukhovskii’s post-apocalyptic novel Metro 2033 (2002).

23). The metro’s interior design is defined by socialist realist aesthetics, which also provides an important subtext for Pelevin’s novel, informing its peculiar combination of the traumatic and absurd.

Due to its origins in Stalinist times, the Moscow metro is associated with the trauma of Soviet modernity. For Mikhail Ryklin, the metro is a central symbol of the traumatic Soviet past.

Ryklin interprets the Moscow metro as “a physical manifestation” and institutionalization of Stalinist terror (52). Specifically, he relates the pictorial images in the metro to the Soviet unconscious with its trauma of industrialization and urbanization (58-61). In Omon Ra, the metro represents the simulative, traumatic, and imperial nature of Soviet modernity.

Mark Griffiths claims that “the underground—from the far-flung mines to the Moscow metro—was deeply embedded in Soviet cultural discourse,” representing the site of heroic achievement (495). By moving space exploration underground, Pelevin ironically collapses heroic achievements of different Soviet eras—the thirties and the sixties. As a result, both projects lose their heroic mystique. Pelevin emphasizes sacrifices at the center of Soviet heroic modernity; however, because they contribute to the Soviet simulation of reality, these sacrifices lose their higher meaning.

At the end of the novel, Omon ends up in the center of the Soviet empire and the Soviet unconscious. Instead of participating in imperial expansion through space travel, the protagonist discovers the center of imperial simulation. He has to come to terms with the simulative nature of Soviet modernity, as well as with the lack of meaning in Soviet sacrifice.

In spite of this seemingly hopeless entrapment at the center of power, however, the protagonist is able to escape. Refusing to commit suicide and, instead, killing his assassin, he takes an out-bound metro train. The ending of the novel is ambiguous, since it is not clear

whether the protagonist’s temporary escape from the system can become permanent.

Nevertheless, the ending of the novel is optimistic on a subjective level, since the novel contrasts simulation to self-realization, as illustrated by the growing self-awareness of the protagonist, who manages to escape from the totalizing ideological construct of the state.⁴⁴ This subjective liberation of the protagonist is represented by the novel’s open end, when Omon decides on his subway itinerary: “Однако надо было решать куда ехать. Я поднял глаза на схему маршрутов, висящую на стене рядом со стоп-краном, и стал смотреть, где на красной линии я нахожусь” (123).⁴⁵ Even though he is physically located on “the Red Line,” Omon represents a Soviet subject who is finally freed from the simulative and imperial discourse of ideology. This emphasis on subjective freedom differentiates Omon Ra from the two later novels, where the protagonists acquire absolute power at the cost of their spiritual freedom.